Library Collaboration With Large Digital Humanities Projects

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Although librarians are often cited as important collaborators in digital humanities projects, librarianship as a profession lacks a coordinated approach to digital humanities. There are many reasons for this, such as the broad interdisciplinarity and rapidly evolving nature of digital humanities, which makes it difficult to articulate a large-scale response. Yet it also stems from the fact that library involvement in digital humanities varies across institutions: some libraries at large research-intensive universities host active digital humanities centers while many small schools (as well as public libraries, special libraries, and so forth) are only vaguely aware of digital humanities, if at all.

In a recent survey by the Association of College and Research Libraries Digital Humanities Discussion Group, most of the librarians who responded did not have digital humanities in their job title or description. Equally diverse are the types of work that librarians contribute to digital humanities projects. A 2011 report on digital humanities in libraries by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) noted that digital humanities projects often call upon librarians for consultation and project management, technical and metadata support, instructional services, and resource identification.

The Digital Humanities Advancement Grants program (DHAG) supports innovative, experimental, and/or computationally challenging digital projects, leading to work that can scale to enhance scholarly research, teaching, and public programming in the humanities.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) today announced $897,000 in grants for five international digital humanities projects, in partnership with the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG), which contributed approximately $772,000.

The NEH/DFG Enriching Digital Collections Grants support collaborations between U.S. and German scholars to develop digitization projects that will benefit research in the humanities. Each project was sponsored jointly by an American and a German institution, whose activities will be funded by NEH and DFG respectively.

One award will allow researchers from Cologne University and Maharishi University of Management to work together in establishing an international digital Sanskrit library. Another will support collaboration between Princeton University and the Freie University in Berlin to digitize 236 Arabic manuscripts on Islamic theology and law that will shed new light on the political, intellectual, and literary history of Islamic civilization, but have till now lain largely neglected and inaccessible in private libraries in Yemen.

There are a lot of definitions of what is or what encompasses Digital Humanities (DH). Some reoccurring themes that appear in DH projects are interdisciplinary collaboration and the use of digital technology.

In a 2013 interview with InterActions, Johanna Drucker described digital humanities as a scholarly activity that combines humanities with technology or computing. Seen as an interdisciplinary activity, those engaged in digital humanities are creating new and exciting projects every day.

Digital humanities for librarians is structured in three units, each of which is comprised of several themed chapters. The first section seeks to establish boundaries for the set of people, practices, and tools that make up the digital humanities, starting with a historical overview before introducing the reader to a series of relevant projects and outlining a set of models for librarian support for digital humanities work at universities. The second part provides basic information about 'the digital part' of the field, with chapters on metadata, digital exhibitions and other collection displays, encoding technologies, digital mapping and GIS metadata, and the computational text analysis that briefly covers everything from programming to introduction to several applications that allow for the processing and analysing structured and unstructured data. The last unit focuses on 'the human part' of digital humanities with an emphasis on management and the 'people skills' critical for collaboration across disciplines and professional areas. These final chapters concern public outreach, the range of roles that digital humanities work can involve (including an introduction to various individuals across a number of professions), a variety of models and 'strategic, conceptual, and practical approaches' to the management of projects. The final two chapters on management aim to encourage collaboration and management of data.

A good introduction to some of these debates can be found in the edited volume The digital humanities, which focuses on how digital humanities are challenging and changing the nature of libraries and the practice of librarianship. Various authors highlight the shifting, unbounded definition of digital humanities, a fuzziness that affects the variety of ways in which libraries have integrated its methods, perspectives, and project work into their regular activities. The book is divided into six subthemes: (1) theoretical and critical issues, (2) transforming traditional collections, (3) models of collaboration, (4) planning and project management, (5) the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, and (6) embedded librarian instruction. After the first section, the remaining sub-themes are explored through deep dives into individual digital humanities projects.

The fourth section on project management is the second bulkiest part of the compendium, comprising seven chapters on leveraging the pre-existing project management planning skills of librarians demonstrated in digital projects, developing the project EIRE (the Electronic Irish Research Experience) to improve community through digital production, and managing project documentation to enhance the planning and project execution process. Other chapters cover sustainable digital curation that integrates undergraduate and graduate student labour into workflows, the special aspects of digital humanities projects and institution-building at teaching institutions, making working with large data sets accessible to users without much experience in text-mining, and a model for digitization work without the requisite staffing and budgetary prerequisites normally considered necessary for this kind of work. Collaboration extends to the section on information literacy, which consistently emphasises collective development of literacy skills. Chapters cover a summer teacher development programme that employed the Association of College & Research Libraries framework to teach geospatial tools and history, a model for integrating digital humanities lab work into the classroom using a case study featuring visualization of data from oral history transcripts, two models for conversation-based development of digital humanities literacy goals, and building the conversations that are necessary for connecting the overlapping goals and values of libraries and the digital humanities.

The volume closes with the largest section, ten chapters on embedded library instruction. The first chapter covers how to support digital humanities work at universities with ordinary library services that do not include a specialised centre, with a specific focus on the role of the subject librarian as already embedded in teaching and research networks. The following chapter covers teaching Text Encoding Initiative practices, furthering digital and information literacy by bringing the construction of digital editions into the classroom. The next chapter extends the emphasis on collaboration, arguing that digital humanities projects are uniquely well-positioned to facilitate productive relationships between librarians, faculty, technical staff, and students with faculty. Other chapters focus on the role of subject librarian providing digital humanities classroom instruction, investigate student-directed curricula, the process of constructing a distance course with historical, archival digital humanities work at the centre, and the opportunities presented by geographic information systems for teaching The final two chapters analyse collaboration in a course teaching the impact of digital on literature and reading and collaboration between libraries and faculty that can support both the development of local digital humanities work in which researchers are invested.

The relative youth and wide-ranging nature of digital humanities means that both of these overviews focus on and use descriptions of an array of projects as a means to define the field of digital humanities without needing to weigh in on this more theoretical and academic debate. This area is defined across and within the books as a set of tools, practices, and concepts, depending on what digital material or project is being described. This practical focus allows the books to demonstrate how digital humanities projects are beginning to build on one another, developments that underline the importance of open-source materials and projects. This importance is emphasised specifically in the chapter on touch technology and medieval manuscripts, which utilised digitised documents from the Getty and open-source hardware and software to build an interactive exhibition and the chapter on digital curation, which notes that curation in digital environments must also ensure reuse opportunities (Gallant & Denzer; Sabharwal, both in Millson-Martula & Gunn 2020). Regardless of its theoretical underpinnings, the field of digital humanities is beginning to achieve a kind of definition, as a rather solid web of project work. It is this web that requires analysis if digital humanists are to successfully begin to theorise their field of study.

Recent years have seen cultural heritage organizations undergo a cultural shift as part of an agenda with an increased focus on digital innovation and audience engagement. Opening up collections through digitization and making them accessible to scholars, students, and the general public has been a strategic priority for many institutions. Alongside the technological advances of the past decades, the proliferation of various types of digital information objects has brought large changes to traditional scholarship in the Arts & Humanities. 2b1af7f3a8

Library Collaboration With Large Digital Humanities Projects

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